Impendi’s Manufacturing Center of Excellence is established to assist manufacturers to find, get and keep hidden value from their established but rapidly changing supply chains. These initiatives can be tricky since procurement, operations, and engineering groups need to work closely together so that new solutions do not breach quality standards or increase exposure to supply disruptions.

Balancing savings opportunities with identified risks
COOs and CPOs know that quality is non-negotiable. Nevertheless, there may be areas where your organization is over-indexing on the status quo and missing opportunities. After an initial buying decision, factors like ease of doing business, personal relationships, or simple fear of making a change can reduce negotiating fervor and cause unwanted drift from procurement disciplines.
Our senior leaders also recognize from experience that stakeholders in operations, engineering, and customer-facing teams in your organization have legitimate concerns that should be addressed about quality, reliability of supply, security or diversity when it comes to changes in the manufacturing supply chain.
Rather than rigid playbooks that ignore legitimate risks, experts in the Manufacturing Center of Excellence will lead your teams through a disciplined procurement process. Using advanced data analytics, disruptors, category and marketing knowledge, new pricing structures, and quality benchmarks, these leaders are prepared to help you get and keep identified savings opportunities.

Manufacturing-savvy ringleaders prepare advise, then do the work
The Manufacturing Center of Excellence is led by executives who have walked in your shoes as operators and process engineers at leading manufacturing organizations like Alcatel, Lucent, Itron, Coinstar and Redbox. Having seen and tried different approaches in sourcing and procurement, they bring an outside-in view to what you do and how you do it.
“Cost” is not simply a number on a purchase order. Our senior leaders bring supplemental resources so that special care and analytical acumen are used to account for the connections between the material and transformation cost, shipping expense from the point of origin, changing tariffs, even the impact of your stated ESG goals.
Don’t worry. We won’t just float PowerPoint slides with theories about what could be better. We get in the trenches, create tools and processes, then cross-train your teams so they understand what was done and why. In many cases, our domain experiences mean that we know your key suppliers from dealing with them in prior roles and having had to live with the results.

Leaving behind better ways to find, get and keep savings
Perhaps the most valuable and enduring feature of an engagement involving our Manufacturing Center is that it challenges established thinking and engrains new disciplines for managing supply chain opportunities.
To secure the future, we’ll examine “how you buy” so you know where your processes are strong and where they could use a tune up. Then, we’ll work hands-on with your procurement and operating organizations, so they can use best practice approaches to manage contract manufacturers, structure data exchanges, use data to identify cost savings, discover disruptive new suppliers, and move forward with a competitive bid event.
